16th Century American Imperialism

Since the rising of the imperialism in the 16th century, more than three fourths of the population all over the world had been affected by the colonial experience (Ashcroft 1). Until the middle of the 20th century—after the WW2—colonies are gradually getting rid of the colonial domination, and becoming independent in succession, which indicates they enter into the postcolonial period. Despite emerging as independent nations, they cannot break away from the effect left by the colonists in all respects, from culture, language and religion, to politics, economy and military. Peoples in these states, no matter the former colonized or their descendants often have problem of identification, feeling confused and even painful about the uncertainty

Moreover, modern science and technologies help to accelerate this process. Hi-tech communication technologies for example—satellite communications, internet, etc.—will shorten the distant in both space and time between people from different areas. Unfortunately, however, the victories of modern science “in biochemistry and psychology will give the politicians a prodigious power to universalize and homogenize,” which leads local cultures to extinction (Grant 4). Postcolonial nations therefore are in urgent need of preserving their inherent cultural identities or seeking for an unique identity distinguishing the new established nation from its suzerain. Under this kind of environment, Canada, as an ex-colonial nation, is faced with the same problem of identity. As George Grant has said in his essay, “[s]ince 1945, the world-wide and uniform society is no longer a distant dream but a close possibility,” which is causing “Canada’s collapse” (Grant

Different from the postcolonial country like India that has its original cultural tradition, and the country like US that experiences a period “of a certain magnitude,” “in which a social imagination can take root and establish a tradition” (Northrop 12), a country like Canada is much harder to establish its own national or cultural identity. In order to avoid the impact from Great Britain and US, and the “forces of provincial identity” (Smith 1), such as Quebec, Canadian government highly promotes an idea of national identity which is collective and unified, a symbol differentiating Canadians from peoples of other nations, like “The Frontier” in American and “The Island” in English (Atwood 24). However, what these transformations have brought to identity is not merely limited to a national level. It, with a “distinctive type of structural change” in the late 20th century that “is fragmenting the cultural landscapes of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and nationality which gave us firm location as social individuals,” has changed the traditional sense of self simultaneously (Hall 1992, 274). We are not seeing ourselves “as integrated subjects” any longer. Everyone is experiencing a “set of double displacements,”